Reflective Equilibrium

Many of us, perhaps all of us, have examined our moral judgments
about a particular issue by looking for their coherence with our
beliefs about similar cases and our beliefs about a broader range of
moral and factual issues. In this everyday practice, we have sought
“reflective equilibrium” among these various beliefs as a way of
clarifying for ourselves just what we ought to do. In
addition, we may also have been persuading ourselves that our
conclusions were justifiable and ultimately acceptable to us by seeking
coherence among them. Even though it is part of our everyday practice,
is this approach to deliberating about what is right and finding
justification for our views defensible?

Viewed most generally, a “reflective equilibrium” is the end-point
of a deliberative process in which we reflect on and revise our beliefs
about an area of inquiry, moral or non-moral. The inquiry might be as
specific as the moral question, “What is the right thing to do in this
case?” or the logical question, “Is this the correct inference to
make?” Alternatively, the inquiry might be much more general, asking
which theory or account of justice or right action we should accept, or
which principles of inductive reasoning we should use. We can also
refer to the process or method itself as the “method of reflective
equilibrium.”

In what follows, we first give an overview of the method of reflective
equilibrium and comment briefly on its history. We then discuss in
more detail the evolution of the method and its role in the work of
John Rawls. Against that background, we then remark on some of the
controversy surrounding the claim that coherence among our moral or
our logical beliefs in reflective equilibrium counts as a
justification for them, including the challenge to including moral
intuitions or facts about the world in such a justification. Finally,
we discuss some implications the method has for work in ethics.

The method of reflective equilibrium consists in working back and
forth among our considered judgments (some say our “intuitions”) about
particular instances or cases, the principles or rules that we believe
govern them, and the theoretical considerations that we believe bear
on accepting these considered judgments, principles, or rules,
revising any of these elements wherever necessary in order to achieve
an acceptable coherence among them. The method succeeds and we achieve
reflective equilibrium when we arrive at an acceptable coherence among
these beliefs. An acceptable coherence requires that our beliefs not
only be consistent with each other (a weak requirement), but that some
of these beliefs provide support or provide a best explanation for
others. Moreover, in the process we may not only modify prior beliefs
but add new beliefs as well. There need be no assurance the reflective
equilibrium is stable—we may modify it as new elements arise in our
thinking (Schroeter 2004). In practical contexts, this deliberation
may help us come to a conclusion about what we ought to do when we had
not at all been sure earlier. (Scanlon 2002). We arrive at an optimal
equilibrium when the component judgments, principles, and theories are
ones we are un-inclined to revise any further because together they
have the highest degree of acceptability or credibility for us. An
alternative account retains the importance of revisability and
emphasizes the positive role of examining our moral intuitions, but
rejects the appeal to coherentism in favor a treating our intuitive
moral judgments as the right sort to count as foundational, even if
they are still defeasible (McMahan 2000).

The method of reflective equilibrium has been advocated as a coherence
account of justification (as contrasted with an account of truth) in
several areas of inquiry,including inductive and deductive logic as
well as ethics and political philosophy. The key idea underlying this
view of justification is that we “test” various parts of
our system of beliefs against the other beliefs we hold, looking for
ways in which some of these beliefs support others, seeking coherence
among the widest set of beliefs, and revising and refining them at all
levels when challenges to some arise from others. For example, a moral
principle or moral judgment about a particular case (or,
alternatively, a rule of inductive or deductive inference or a
particular inference) would be justified if it cohered with the rest
of our beliefs about right action (or correct inferences) on due
reflection and after appropriate revisions throughout our system of
beliefs. By extension of this account, a person who holds a principle
or judgment in reflective equilibrium with other relevant beliefs can
be said to be justified in believing that principle or judgment.

Because we are expected to revise our beliefs at all levels as we work
back and forth among them and subject them to various criticisms, this
coherence view contrasts sharply with a variety of foundationalist
approaches to justification. In ethics, some foundationalist
approaches take some subset of our moral beliefs as fixed or
unrevisable. Other foundationalists at least claim that some subset of
our moral beliefs are immediately or directly justified (perhaps even
“self-evident”) or warranted (leaving aside the issue of
revisability) and serve as the basis on which all other beliefs are
justified. Still others take some subset of our beliefs as at least
justifiable independently of any other moral beliefs, even if they are
justifiable in light of either necessary or contingent views of the
person or human nature or through appeals to the logic of moral
discourse (Timmons 1987). Reflective equilibrium, as most understand
it aside from McMahan (2000), singles out no such group of privileged
or directly justified beliefs, distinguishing itself from all these
forms of foundationalism.

Because it is not foundationalist in these ways, reflective
equilibrium also avoids some other problematic distinctions or claims
that are part of an effort to show how some beliefs can be directly
justified or warranted. For example, some foundationalists view
particular moral judgments as fixed; others might think it is our
moral principles or some deeper theoretical beliefs from which such
principles might be derived that are fixed and unrevisable. Some
proponents of both approaches have then claimed that a moral sense or
faculty reveals these directly justified beliefs to us. For others, we
can discover the foundational beliefs in some deep moral belief
structure that is revealed to us through a careful examination of
moral intuitions that is arguably a priori. A considerable part of
contemporary work in substantive ethics treats appeals to moral
intuitions or considered judgments in this way (Thompson 1976, McMahan
2000, G.A. Cohen 2007).

In contrast, advocates of reflective equilibrium need tell no
controversial stories about credentials for a special subset of
beliefs that is directly justifiable. Where such advocates credit some
initial beliefs with strong initial acceptance, as Rawls (Rawls 1971)
does when he refers to some beliefs as initial “fixed
points,” the beliefs remain revisable; in any case, they are not
taken to be points we believe independently of other moral and
non-moral beliefs we hold, and so they have no special foundations
(Harman 2003). This revisability of the initial beliefs and their
dependence on other beliefs when reasons for them are requested means
that no such special epistemological story has to be told about
them.

As we shall see, however, an important point of controversy,
especially in ethics, is not that reflective equilibrium allows for the
revision of all moral judgments but, rather, that it involves giving
some initial justificatory weight to them at all.

This approach to the justification of rules of inductive
logic—without the label “reflective
equilibrium”—was proposed by Nelson Goodman in his
classic Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (Goodman 1955). Goodman's
idea was that we justify rules of inference in inductive or deductive
logic by bringing them into reflective equilibrium with what we judge
to be acceptable inferences in a broad range of particular cases. No
rule of inference would be acceptable as a logical principle if it was
not compatible with what we take to be acceptable instances of
inferential reasoning. In this sense, our beliefs about acceptable
rules of inference are constrained by the “evidence”
provided by what we believe to be good or correct examples or
instances of inferential reasoning. At the same time, we should
correct or revise our views about particular inferences we initially
might think are acceptable if we come to see them as incompatible with
rules that we generally accept and refuse to reject because they, in
turn, best account for a broad range of other acceptable
inferences.

Some have criticized this account as giving too much weight to our
actual inductive practices (Stich 1990). Obviously, not all elements
of the everyday reasoning practices of all individuals are
justifiable. For example, many of us, to our chagrin, have had to
confess committing the error of the gamblers fallacy in our own
betting on games or on the events of life. Quite generally,
psychological studies reveal widespread errors in reasoning in a broad
range of contexts. More recently, others have suggested that
reflective equilibrium is problematic as a form of justification of
inductive reasoning because it is fragile as a method, allowing some
features of our beliefs to trigger significant changes in the
equilibrium they reach, and it provides inadequate assurance about its
reliability, as a way of telling us what beliefs to replace with other
beliefs (Harman and Kulkarni 2006).

Though Goodman thinks justification of our reasoning practices depends
on what inferences we accept when we reason inductively and
deductively, he is not simply seeking to systematize whatever
inferences we happen to find people
sometimes—unreflectively—make. Instead, he insists that
practice can and should be corrected as we work back and forth from
tentative principles to practice, revising where appropriate,
presumably eliminating the sorts of inconsistencies that some
psychological studies, and our everyday experiences, reveal. But,
some critics ask (Siegel 1992), if practice should be revised, why
should we view “fit” with practice as at all
justificatory?

A more generous reading of Goodman's proposal would widen the
reflective equilibrium he proposes to include some of the beliefs
about standards for acceptable inference that logicians develop
(though some think that wide reflective equilibrium does not overcome
the reliability problem noted above). Such standards are themselves
not independent of all inferential practice. They have been developed
to reflect views about what counts as good practice in light of the
kinds of inferences that people abandon when they are made aware of
their inconsistency with other inferences they will not give up. It is
against this wider set of beliefs, including the articulation of such
standards, that we can identify some inferences as performance errors
or otherwise deviant patterns and correct those practices. (We turn to
the distinction between wide and narrow reflective equilibrium
shortly.)

Despite the fact that the origins of reflective equilibrium (minus
the name) lie in mid-twentieth century discussions about the
justification of inductive logic, its principal development through the
rest of the century lies primarily in ethics and political philosophy.
Specifically, the method was given prominence (and the name by which it
is known) by John Rawls's description and use of it in A Theory of
Justice (Rawls 1971). (Rawls 1951 had much earlier articulated a
slightly different version of the view.) Although accounts of the
justification of empirical knowledge have been developed that share
with reflective equilibrium its coherentist approach, they generally do
not make explicit use of the terminology of reflective equilibrium, and
we shall not discuss them here. Instead, we concentrate on the use of
reflective equilibrium in ethics and political philosophy, where it has
been deployed and criticized.

Rawls (Rawls 1971) argues that the goal of a theory of justice is to
establish the terms of fair cooperation that should govern free and
equal moral agents. On this view, the appropriate perspective from
which to choose among competing conceptions or principles of justice is
a hypothetical social contract or choice situation in which contractors
are constrained in their knowledge, motivations, and tasks in specific
ways. Because this choice situation is fair to all participants, Rawls
calls the conception of justice that emerges from this choice “justice
as fairness.” Under these constraints, he argues, rational contractors
would choose principles guaranteeing equal basic liberties and equality
of opportunity, and a principle that permitted inequalities only if
they made the people who are worst off as well off as possible.

Instead of simply accepting whatever principles contractors would
choose under these constraints on choice, however, Rawls imposed a
further condition of adequacy on them. The chosen principles must also
match our considered judgments about justice in reflective equilibrium.
If they do not, then we are to revise the constraints on choice in the
contract situation until we arrive at a contract that yields principles
that are in reflective equilibrium with our considered judgments about
justice. In effect, the device of the contract must itself be in
reflective equilibrium with the rest of our beliefs about justice. The
contract helps us determine what principles we should choose from among
competing views, but the justification for using it and designing it so
that it serves that purpose must itself derive from the reflective
equilibrium that it helps us achieve.

The method of reflective equilibrium thus plays a role in both the
construction and justification of Rawls's theory of justice (Daniels
1996; Scanlon 2002). Its role in construction is an example of its use
as a form of deliberation. Critics of Rawls's theory and his method of
reflective equilibrium, especially utilitarians, challenge the
prominence the method gives to moral judgments or intuitions. Building
a theory—constructing it—out of such initial judgments is
building it on easily discredited bases, for are not many of our
beliefs just the result of historical accident and bias, even
superstition? Indeed, some argue that there is no justificatory force
to the contract itself if we “rig” the contract so that it yields
principles that match our intuitions (Hare 1973). Despite these and other
criticisms, defenders of the method have elaborated it and extended its
use in broad areas of ethics. Later in this article we shall consider
some of the criticisms of this method and some of its extensions in
more detail. Before doing so, however, it is necessary to describe it
more fully.

A reflective equilibrium may be narrow or wide (Rawls 1974). All of
us are familiar with a process in moral deliberation in which we work
back and forth between a judgment we are inclined to make about right
action in a particular case and the reasons or principles we offer for
that judgment. Often we consider variations on the particular case,
“testing” the principle against them, and then refining and specifying
it to accommodate our judgments about these variations. We might also
revise what we say about certain cases if our initial views do not fit
with the principles we grow inclined to accept.

Such a revision may constitute a moral surprise or discovery
(Daniels 1996). Suppose, for example, that we are considering whether
we should ignore age in the distribution of medical treatments. Many
initially believe that age is a “morally irrelevant trait,” just like
race, and they would insist that rationing medical services by age is
just as unacceptable as rationing by race. On considering a variety of
cases, however, it might become apparent that we all age, although we
do not change race. This difference means that the different treatment
of people at different ages, if systematically applied over the
lifespan, does not create inequalities between persons, as it would in
the case of race. We might be led by this realization to think that age
rationing might be acceptable under some conditions when race rationing
would never be, and this would be a moral surprise for many who changed
their view.

To the extent that we focus solely on particular cases and a group
of principles that apply to them, and to the extent that we are not
subjecting the views we encounter to extensive criticism from
alternative moral perspectives, we are seeking only narrow
reflective equilibrium. Presumably, the principles we arrive at in
narrow equilibrium best “account for” the cases examined. Others,
however, may arrive at different narrow reflective equilibria,
containing different principles and judgments about justice. Indeed,
one such narrow equilibrium might be characterized as typically
utilitarian, while another is, we may suppose, Kantian or perhaps
Libertarian. As a result, we still face an important question about
justification unanswered by the method of narrow reflective
equilibrium: which set of beliefs about justice should we accept?

Because narrow reflective equilibrium does not answer this question,
it may seem to be a descriptive method appropriate to moral
anthropology, not a normative account of justification in
ethics. In fact, Rawls (Rawls 1971) at one point suggested that
arriving at the principles that match our moral judgments in
reflective equilibrium might reveal our “moral grammar” in
a way that is analogous to uncovering the grammar that underlies our
syntactic ability as native speakers of a language to make judgments
about grammatical form. In support of the analogy, some contemporary
theorists who systematically examine our moral intuitions, often
through hypothetical as opposed to real cases, believe they are
uncovering an underlying moral structure of principles (see Kamm
1993), perhaps one that is
a priori.

Uncovering a syntax, however, is a descriptive and not a
justificatory task. Once we can identify the grammar or rules that best
account for a person's syntactic competency, we do not ask the
question, Should that person have this grammar? We are satisfied to
have captured the grammar underlying a person's idiolect. In ethics and
political philosophy, in contrast, we must answer that justificatory
question, especially since there is often disagreement among people
about what is right, disagreement that is not resolved simply by
pursuing narrow reflective equilibrium.

In A Theory of Justice (1971, revised edition 1999), Rawls
does not use the terminology of narrow and wide reflective equilibrium,
an omission he remarks about with regret in Justice as Fairness: A
Restatement (2001, p. 31). Still, he comments that seeking a
reflective equilibrium that merely irons out minor incoherence in a
person's system of beliefs is not really the use of the method that is
of true philosophical interest in ethics, just as we saw it might not
be in the case of justifying logical inferences. Rather, he says, to be
of interest to moral philosophy, a reflective equilibrium should seek
what results from challenging existing beliefs by arguments and
implications that derive from the panoply of developed positions in
moral and political philosophy (Rawls A Theory of Justice 2nd Edition,
1999, p. 43). Such a reflective equilibrium would be the response to
considerable critical pressures on the original beliefs. This effort
would have the character of searching deliberation about what is right.
It is this much broader from of challenge that Rawls labels the method
of wide reflective equilibrium.

3.2.1 A Theory of Justice

Rawls's proposal is that we can determine what principles of justice
we ought to adopt, on full reflection, and be persuaded that our
choices are justifiable to ourselves and others, only if we broaden
the circle of beliefs that must cohere. Indeed, we should be willing
to test our beliefs against developed moral theories of various types,
obviously not all such views, or we would never arrive at a
conclusion, but at least against some leading alternatives. In effect,
Rawls's (Rawls 1971) pair-wise comparison of justice as fairness with
utilitarianism is just such an exercise at seeking wide reflective
equilibrium. In a wide reflective equilibrium, for example,
we broaden the field of relevant moral and non-moral beliefs
(including general social theory)to include an account of the
conditions under which it would be fair for reasonable people to
choose among competing principles, as well as evidence that the
resulting principles constitute a feasible or stable conception of
justice, that is, that people could sustain their commitment to such
principles. Rawls's argument is that justice as fairness, rather than
utilitarianism, is what emerges in wide reflective equilibrium.

For example, the constraints on choice in Rawls's contract situation,
such as the veil of ignorance that keeps us from knowing facts about
ourselves and our specific preferences, require justification. Rawls
needs to show that these constraints are “fair” to all
contractors (thus “justice as fairness” is his label for
this procedural account of how we find out what is just.) To provide
such justification, Rawls appeals to beliefs about the fundamental
“moral powers” of “free and equal” agents
(they can form and revise their conceptions of what is good and they
have a sense of justice). He also appeals to the ideal of a
well-ordered society in which principles of justice play a particular
role as public principles for reconciling disputes. Rawls must even
provide us with an account of “primary social goods,”
necessary if agents who do not know their own actual preferences are
to decide what principles would be better for them to choose.

The device of the contract is thus in reflective equilibrium with
certain background theories that themselves contain moral beliefs.
These are theories, or crucial beliefs, about the nature of persons,
the role of morality or justice in society, and beliefs about
procedural justice. The contract is not simply based on
uncontroversial assumptions about human rationality, although it
describes a rational choice problem within the constraints it imposes;
nor is it based on formal considerations about practical reasoning or
the logic or semantics of moral discourse. If Rawls were trying to
justify the structure of the contract by appeal to theories that
themselves were completely non-moral, then he would be offering the
kind of independent justification for the principles that would
characterize them as foundational (Daniels 1996, Timmons 1987), so the
claim that the background theories are themselves moral is part of the
rationale for concluding that Rawls is clearly rejecting
foundationalism (even if others who appeal to reflective equilibrium
claim moral intuitions may be of a foundational sort, even if
revisable). Without acceptance of that wider circle of moral beliefs,
Rawls's construction lacks support, and if that construction were
modified, some of his arguments against utilitarianism would be
weakened.

Our beliefs about justice are justified (and, by extension, we are
justified in holding them) if they cohere in such a wide reflective
equilibrium. Obviously, the method of wide reflective equilibrium is
here only illustrated by appeal to the detail of Rawls's use of it. If
we abstract from that detail, we see that there is a complex structure
and interaction of beliefs, at many levels of generality, that bear on
the construction of an account of justice. We shall later return to
this point when we talk about some of the criticisms of method and
about implications of this method for work in ethics.

3.2.2 Political Liberalism and ‘justice as political’

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls seemed to think that all people
might converge on a common or shared wide reflective
equilibrium that included “justice as fairness,” the
conception of justice for which he argues. Wide reflective equilibrium
thus played a role in the construction of the theory, helping
“us”—any and all of us—to articulate its key
features in ways that led to principles that matched “our”
considered judgments. At the same time, wide reflective equilibrium
constituted an account of justification. Shared agreement on that wide
equilibrium would produce a well-ordered society governed by
principles guaranteeing equal basic liberties, fair equality of
opportunity, and the requirement that inequalities be arranged to make
those who are worst off as well off as possible.

In his later work, Political Liberalism (Rawls 1993), Rawls
abandons the suggestion that all people might converge in the same,
shared wide reflective equilibrium that contains his conception of
justice. This important change comes about because of what Rawls calls
“the burdens of judgment.” Complexity, uncertainty, and
variation in experience lead human reason, when exercised under
conditions of freedom, of the sort protected by the principles of
justice as fairness, to an unavoidable pluralism of comprehensive
moral and philosophical views. This unavoidable fact of reasonable
pluralism makes one key feature of justice as fairness untenable,
namely the account Rawls gave of the stability of his preferred
conception of justice. A further feature of Rawls's late work is his
clear eschewal of any account of truth, so the fact that wide
equilibrium is offered as an account of justification, not truth,
makes it compatible with the refusal to discuss moral truth (see
Little 1984).

Rawls had imposed three basic conditions on the principles of
justice. First, they must be chosen over alternatives under conditions
fair to all contractors. Second, what contractors choose must match
“our” considered moral judgments and other beliefs in
(wide) reflective equilibrium. But third, the principles must comprise
a feasible or stable conception of justice. The test for stability is
to ask if people raised under this view would conform to it over time
with less strain of commitment than other conceptions would face. In
effect, passing the test shows it is worth adopting this view because
it will not prove so fragile that it is not worth the effort to
institutionalize.

The problem facing Rawls because of reasonable pluralism is that his
earlier efforts to show justice as fairness was stable depended on
special views about the importance of autonomy that would be held only
by some people and could not be assumed to be shared. His argument for
stability had turned on appealing to the good of autonomy in ways that
might not be acceptable to people holding certain comprehensive views.
Stability was not demonstrated.

To address this problem, Rawls recasts justice as fairness as a
“freestanding” political conception of justice on which
people with different comprehensive views may agree in an
“overlapping consensus.” The public justification
of such a political conception involves no appeal to the philosophical
or religious views that appear in the comprehensive doctrines that
form this overlapping consensus. Instead, we might think of this
process of working back and forth among the key shared ideas in the
public, democratic culture and the articulated features of the
political conception of justice as a political reflective equilibrium
(Daniels 1996). (We can imagine the process being carried out by
individuals, for example, as citizens thinking about an issue of basic
justice or judges about a matter of constitutional essentials, and as
a collective process, in public deliberation. As noted in Table 1,
people with different comprehensive world views may draw the boundary
between public and private slightly differently and not all questions
about basic justice will be settled in a way that rules out ongoing
disagreement. Thus disagreements about some aspects of reproductive
rights or the separation of church and state may remain contested
features within public reason.) The goal of this exercise of what
Rawls calls “public reason” is the articulation of such a
political reflective equilibrium.

Still, there is no convergence on a shared wide reflective
equilibrium that contains the political conception of justice. The
political reflective equilibrium is not a shared wide
reflective equilibrium, for it avoids appealing to the broad range of
beliefs that would be included in many wide reflective equilibria.
Nevertheless, wide reflective equilibrium still plays a critical role
in justification even when justice is political in this way.

For individuals to be fully justified in adopting the
political conception of justice, the conception articulated in the
political reflective equilibrium, they must incorporate it within a
wide reflective equilibrium that includes their own comprehensive moral
or religious doctrine. It will count as a reasonable view for them only
if the public conception of justice coheres with their other (religious
and philosophical) beliefs in wide reflective equilibrium. Individuals,
whatever groups and associations they belong to, must be able to embark
on the deliberative process called wide reflective equilibrium that
leads them to endorse, from their own perspective, the content of the
political reflective equilibrium, including its injunctions about using
only public reason in thinking about certain basic features of justice
or the constitution.

We can imagine use of wide reflective equilibrium if we modify
slightly Rawls image of an overlapping consensus in which a shared
political conception is a point of convergence among otherwise
different comprehensive world views. Convert each reasonable
comprehensive world view—for example, a Kantian, Millian, or a
Protestant religious view that endorses a notion of free faith—into
a wide reflective equilibrium that is reached by all who hold that
view. These distinct wide equilibria now share a module, the political
reflective equilibrium, though each wide equilibrium will justify the
features of that module in light of beliefs that may not be acceptable
in other wide equilibria.

To help see what has happened to the content of the wide reflective
equilibrium when we shift from the picture in A Theory of
Justice to that in Political Liberalism, consider the
following table:

Philosophical arguments justifying key elements of justice as
fairness, such as argument about autonomy needed to show congruence
between good for individuals and what is just
[n.b. share rationale]

Rationale for key elements of justice as fairness
[n.b. rationale specific to each wide reflective
equilibrium]

Account of reasonableness and burdens of judgment

Rationale for boundary between public and nonpublic; specifics of
boundary.

Rest of moral and religious views

Rest of moral and religious views

Considered moral judgments, all levels

Considered moral judgments, all levels

The first row of the table indicates the content of justice as
fairness, including the background views that support the construction
of the original position. This “module” is contained in both versions
of a wide reflective equilibrium that justifies justice as fairness. In
Theory, as the second row indicates, shared philosophical
arguments justify key elements of the module, but in
Liberalism, the rationale for each of these elements must
derive from the distinctive features of the different comprehensive
views. Thus, as Cohen suggests (1994, p. 1527), a Kantian, a Millian,
and a religious person who believed in free faith might all support,
but for quite different reasons, the idea that agents were free in the
sense of being capable of forming and revising their conceptions of the
good life.

As the third and fourth rows suggest, full justification of a
political conception of justice requires acceptance of an account of
the burdens of judgment that explain why pluralism is a fact of life. A
comprehensive view capable of reaching accommodation with that
pluralism and with the political reflective equilibrium it shares with
other reasonable views must also develop a rationale for the specific
way in which it draws a boundary between public and nonpublic spheres.
Different comprehensive views, however, might vary in just how they
draw that public/private boundary and there may be persistent
controversy about how permeable it is. Nevertheless, the freestanding
public conception of justice as fairness, for example, will be fully
justified for anyone in any of these different wide reflective
equilibria.

It would be natural to object that if we require that full
justification for individuals includes appeal to the varied religious
and philosophical beliefs they hold, then overlapping consensus is
indeed harder to achieve. Remember, Rawls has abandoned a shared wide
reflective equilibrium for just such reasons. Overlapping consensus is
possible, however, because groups sharing comprehensive views modify
the content of their comprehensive views over time in order to
cooperate within shared democratic institutions. This process, on
Rawls's view, involves philosophical reflection, which often draws on
the complex resources of a tradition of thought in which disagreements
had flourished. It also crucially depends on the moderating influence
of living under democratic institutions that are governed by the shared
conception of justice. The effect of both institutions and reflection
about internal disagreements about doctrine is that reasonable
comprehensive world views can find room, from within their own
perspectives, for a wide reflective equilibrium that includes the
elements of public reason (the political reflective equilibrium) and a
willingness to engage in public methods of justification for them.

In sum, even though pluralism requires that we refrain from
appealing to comprehensive world views in certain areas of political
deliberation with others, wide reflective equilibrium remains at the
center of Rawls account of individual moral deliberation about justice.
It survives as the coherentist account of “full justification” he
defends.

Key criticisms of the method of reflective equilibrium have challenged
the role it ascribes to moral intuitions, Rawls's incorporation of
empirical facts(e.g., about human nature, such as the role of
incentives in motivation), and its coherentism. We take these up in
turn.

Central to the method of reflective equilibrium in ethics and
political philosophy is the claim that our considered moral judgments
about particular cases carry weight, if only initial weight, in seeking
justification. This claim is controversial. Some of the most vigorous
criticism of it has come from utilitarians, and it is instructive to
see why.

A traditional criticism of utilitarianism is that it leads us to
moral judgments about what is right that conflict with our “ordinary”
moral judgments. In response, some utilitarians accept the relevance of
some of these judgments and argue that utilitarianism is compatible
with them. Thus Mill argued for a utilitarian foundation for our
beliefs about the importance of individual liberty. Some utilitarians
have even argued that key features of our “common sense morality”
approximates utilitarian requirements and we have acquired these
beliefs just because they do, unconsciously, reflect what promotes
utility; they reflect the wisdom of a heritage.

An alternative utilitarian response to the claim that utilitarianism
conflicts with certain ordinary moral judgments is to dismiss these
judgments as pre-theoretical “intuitions” that probably result from
cultural indoctrination and thus reflect superstition, bias, and mere
historical accident. On this view, moral intuitions or judgments should
have no evidentiary credentials and should play no role in moral theory
construction or justification. Indeed, as the prominent utilitarians
Richard Brandt (Brandt 1979) and Richard Hare (Hare 1973) argued
against Rawls, simply making “coherent” a set of beliefs that have no
“initial credibility” cannot produce justification, since coherent
fictions are still only fictions. Indeed, when Rawls describes the
conditions under which we might solicit considered moral judgments,
namely that people be calm and have adequate information about the
cases, they do not by themselves do anything to assuage the utilitarian
worries. Brandt (Brandt 1990) reaffirms his early criticism when he
claims that considered judgments lack “evidential force” regarding a
moral order and therefore coherence in reflective equilibrium has only
a kind of persuasiveness that comes from coherence among many elements
being more convincing than the conviction that comes from any of its
parts.

This criticism has some force, since two standard ways of supplying
credentials for initial judgments are not available. One traditional
way to support the reliability of these judgments or intuitions is to
claim, as 18th century theorists did, that they are the result of a
special moral faculty that allows us to grasp particular moral facts or
universal principles. Modern proponents of reflective equilibrium
reject such mysterious faculties. Indeed, they claim moral judgments
are revisable, not foundational.

A second way to support the initial credibility of considered
judgments is to draw an analogy between them and observations in
science or everyday life. For example, what counts as observational
evidence in science depends on theory, and theory may give us reasons
to reject some observations as not constituting counter-evidence to a
scientific law or theory. In this way we might see an analogy between
the revisability of moral judgments and observations.

Developing this analogy, however, seems to require that we also tell
some story about why moral judgments are reliable
“observations” about what is right. The foundationalist
view of moral intuitions held by McMahan (2000) and perhaps other
recent theorists who draw extensively on moral intuitions in their
work in substantive ethics also demands some story about their
reliability and so does not avoid this difficulty, even if the view
also allows for defeasibility of some of the foundational
intuitions. Perhaps we might need something like the causal story that
some theorists of knowledge offer to explain the reliability of
observations. Since no such story is forthcoming, opponents argue,
proponents of reflective equilibrium must reject the requirement or
give up the analogy. Proponents of reflective equilibrium might reject
the requirement by suggesting it is premature to ask for such a story
in ethics or by claiming that we can provide no analogous causal story
for credible judgments we make in other areas, including mathematics
or logic.

It might seem that the burden of argument has shifted to advocates
of reflective equilibrium to show why “initial credibility” should be
ascribed to moral judgments or intuitions. Defenders of reflective
equilibrium may nevertheless reject this burden, arguing that critics,
especially utilitarian critics, actually face the same problem. For
example, Richard Brandt argues that “facts and logic” alone, and not
moral intuitions, should play a role in moral theory construction and
justification. On Brandt's view, we should choose moral principles when
they are based on desires that have been subjected to maximal criticism
by facts and logic alone (he calls it “cognitive psychotherapy”). We
should avoid any appeal to moral intuitions that might infect this
critique.

The desires that Brandt appeals to, however, are themselves shaped and
influenced by the very same social structures that utilitarians
complain have biased and corrupted our moral judgments. Nothing in the
process of critique by facts and logic alone can eliminate this source
of bias. If this claim is right, it undercuts the suggestion that we
can step outside our beliefs to arrive at some more objective form of
justification. Instead, we may be better off recognizing that our
process of critique—in the method of wide reflective
equilibrium—is explicit about exposing the sources of bias and
historical accident to criticism and revision, rather than fooling
ourselves into thinking that desires are some sort of
morally-uninfluenced layer of “facts.”

Rawls claims that his view of justice is constructivist, meaning that
he appeals to some general claims about the nature of persons as well
as some empirical facts about human behavior or institutions as part
of the justification for the principles of justice (or the choice
situation that leads us to pick them). G.A. Cohen (2008) criticizes
constructivism, so understood, as not being capable of articulating
the content of what justice itself requires and instead being suited
only for selecting rules of regulation for society. The problem, he
argues, is that constructivism combines considerations of justice with
other considerations (both empirical and moral). As a result, it does
not tell us what justice itself requires. Specifically, he argues that
if considerations of justice plus other values and some empirical
facts suggest that we should adopt certain rules to regulate our
institutions, those rules cannot be principles of justice, since other
considerations than justice contribute to our thinking that we should
adopt them. A possible reply to Cohen is that his view about
constructivism collapses into his controversial metaethical claim that
principles of justice cannot rest on general facts about human
behavior or anything else, if the other values that we consider are
appropriately focused on determining what we think about justice.
Then the other considerations that continue to play a role are appeals
to empirical facts.

To understand why the objection to constructivism collapses into
Cohen's metaethical view, if any values relevant to choices in the
Original Position are relevant to determining what justice requires,
consider the following. Cohen claims that, if we appeal to reflective
equilibrium as a justification of what justice requires, we need to
strip away from it any appeal to empirical facts and include only
moral intuitions about justice itself (Cohen 2007: p. 243,
n. 19). Specifically, he is saying that we might choose the right
account of justice itself through appeal to a narrow reflective
equilibrium that avoids any empirical considerations, and this is true
even if the account of justice that applies to our world does involve
some relevant facts. This restriction on reflective equilibrium
implies that we would have to revise the account of the role of wide
reflective equilibrium that we earlier attributed to Rawls,
specifically that it, and not narrow reflective equilibrium, plays a
justificatory role in supporting justice as fairness. For example, we
would have to abandon the argument made earlier that inadequate
critical considerations play a role in narrow reflective equilibrium
as compared with wide reflective equilibrium.

Rawls insists that the principles that emerge from the Original
Position must fit with our considered judgments about justice in wide
reflective equilibrium. This constraint on the outcome of the Original
Position is aimed at showing that these principles are really
principles of justice. On Cohen's view this constraint could not show
what Rawls intends--the outcome for him of the choices made in the
Original Position are rules of regulation, not principles of justice.
But if Cohen is wrong (as the objection we are examining implies) about
a broader set of values than justice being in play in the choices made
in the Original Position, then his objection to constructivism
collapses into his metaethical view, for it is an objection to
appealing to the facts that are part of the wide reflective
equilibrium to which Rawls does appeal. Similarly, Rawls's overall
account of justification makes the relative stability of a conception
of justice (given facts about human nature and behavior) part of the
justification for his principles of justice as fairness, but Cohen
concludes that this role is inappropriate.

If Cohen is right, then wide reflective equilibrium is not relevant to
choosing between Rawls's account of justice and some other theory
(such as luck egalitarianism), because we must restrict ourselves to a
different, much narrower, version of reflective equilibrium to justify
principles of justice. It would be odd to make such a substantive
issue depend on a metaethical claim that Cohen himself says is not a
substantive claim about which principles of justice are to be believed
or accepted.

Other criticisms of reflective equilibrium in ethics have focused on
points familiar from discussions in epistemology more generally. One
important complaint concerns the vagueness of the concept of coherence.
If we simply take logical consistency as the criterion for coherence,
we have much too weak a constraint. What account can we give of a
stronger notion?

More has to be said about how some parts of the system of beliefs
“support or explain” others than is provided in the account above.
Critics of Rawls's requirement that the contract situation be adjusted,
if necessary, to yield principles that are in reflective equilibrium
with our judgments about justice complained that this was a “rigged”
contract and that it did no justificatory work beyond reflective
equilibrium. If, however, the moral judgments that play a role in
discussions of fair process, the well-ordered society, and the moral
powers of agents are somewhat independent of the considered judgments
about justice, then we get the kind of independent support for the
principles that add justificatory force. Little work has actually been
done, however, to flesh out a stronger account of coherence in ethics
as opposed to epistemology more generally, where coherentism has been
defended and elaborated.

A second line of objection derives from anti-coherentist accounts of
justification rooted in the theory of knowledge. Some insist, for
example, that coherence accounts of justification cannot be divorced
from coherence accounts of truth. On the other hand, Rawls view fits
with the claim by some contemporary theorists of knowledge that a
coherence account of justification is distinguishable from a coherence
account of truth and defensible when so separated.

This separability of justification from claims about truth is
important to Rawls, even more so in his later work than in A Theory
of Justice. In his earlier work, Rawls never claimed that what
emerged from his contract and other justificatory conditions were
“truths” of justice. Rather, the method of reflective equilibrium
suggested ways in which convergence might be achieved among those who
began with disagreements about justice. By drawing attention to the
many features of a comprehensive theory on which argument and evidence
could be brought to bear, the method of wide reflective equilibrium
held out promise that more convergence might result than if people had
only considered judgments and principles to agree and disagree about.
Convergence did not imply that truth was reached. A proponent of moral
truth might still hope, however, that convergence could be taken as
evidence for truth, just as it might be in non-normative areas of
inquiry.

Once Rawls took the “burdens of judgment” and reasonable pluralism
seriously, that is once he “politicized” justice in his later work, it
became much less plausible to talk about convergence on a shared wide
equilibrium that might contain moral truth. Comprehensive philosophical
views, including those about moral truth, were barred from playing a
role in seeking the political reflective equilibrium involved in
overlapping consensus. Even if we converged in an “overlapping
consensus” on a conception of justice, individuals and groups would be
able to claim they are fully justified in accepting that conception of
justice only if it cohered with the perspectives of their distinct wide
reflective equilibria. It became more important for Rawls to suggest
how claims about justice could be “objective” without presupposing
moral truth. These developments in Rawls's account thus appear to move
him farther away from those who would seek to give a realist account of
moral truth.

One further group of criticisms of reflective equilibrium derives
largely from claims about human rationality. A starting point for this
line of argument is the complaint that people who have different
starting points as their initial set of beliefs, say with different
degrees of credence given to their beliefs, may arrive at different
reflective equilibria points. This possibility undercuts the suggestion
that critical pressures alone deriving can produce convergence. A more
general form of this worry is that the model of reflection involved in
reflective equilibrium, in which we are to produce coherence among all
our beliefs, overemphasizes and idealizes human rationality. The
suggestion is that we would be better off presupposing a more minimal
form of rationality. A specific version of this complaint is that the
method involves an information burden that cannot be met. Yet another
version of this criticism is that we should allow for much less
“rationalist” forms of modification of our views, recognizing
“conversion” experiences like those involved in “paradigm shifts” may
affect any account of coherence.

A full defense of reflective equilibrium as a method would require a
more developed response to many of these lines of criticism than exists
in the literature.

Despite these criticisms, some philosophers have argued for a
broader understanding of the relevance of the method of reflective
equilibrium to practical ethics. In thinking about the course of right
action in a particular case, we often appeal to reasons and principles
that are notoriously general and lack the kind of specificity that make
them suitable to govern the case at hand without committing us to
implications we cannot accept in other contexts. This requires that we
refine or specify the reasons and principles if we are to provide
appropriate justifications for what we do and appropriate guidance for
related cases. Philosophers who have focused attention on the
importance of specification have drawn on the method of reflective
equilibrium for their insights into the problem.

In practical ethics, especially bioethics, there has been a vigorous
debate about methodology. Some argue that we must root all claims about
specific cases in specific ethical theories, and the hard work is
showing how these theories apply to specific cases. Others argue that
we may disagree about many aspects of general theory but still agree on
principles, and the hard work of practical ethics consists in fitting
sometimes conflicting principles to particular cases. Still others
argue that we must begin our philosophical work with detailed
understanding of the texture and specificity of a case, avoiding the
temptation to intrude general principles or theories into the
analysis.

A grasp of the method of wide reflective equilibrium suggests a way
around this exclusionary nature of this debate. Wide reflective
equilibrium shows us the complex structure of justification in ethics
and political philosophy, revealing many connections among our
component beliefs. At the same time, there are many different types of
ethical analysis and normative inquiry.

This suggests a more eclectic view of the debate about method. Work
in ethics requires all levels of inquiry proposed by the disputants,
not always all at once or in each case, but at some time or other.
Sometimes it is true that we cannot resolve disputes about how to weigh
conflicts among principles unless we bring more theoretical
considerations to bear (these considerations need not involve
comprehensive ethical theories). Sometimes we can agree on relevant
principles and agree to disagree on other theoretical issues, still
arriving at agreement about the rightness of particular policies or
actions and their justification in light of relevant reasons and
principles. Sometimes we must see what is distinctive about particular
cases and revise or refine our reasons and principles before we can
arrive at understanding of what to do. Finally, and of the greatest
significance, the method of wide reflective equilibrium should make it
clear that work in ethical theory cannot be divorced from work in
practical ethics. We must test and revise theory in light of our
considered judgments about moral practice. The condescending attitude
of many who work in ethical theory toward work in practical ethics thus
is incompatible with what wide reflective equilibrium establishes about
the relationship between these areas of ethical inquiry.

The method of wide reflective equilibrium makes it plausible that
all such “methods” should be seen as appropriate to some tasks in
ethics and are but parts of a more encompassing method.

The SEP would like to congratulate the National Endowment for the Humanities on its 50th anniversary and express our indebtedness for the five generous grants it awarded our project from 1997 to 2007.
Readers who have benefited from the SEP are encouraged to examine the NEH’s anniversary page and, if inspired to do so, send a testimonial to neh50@neh.gov.